Accreting Protoplanets in the LkCa 15 Transition Disk

التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
العنوان: Accreting Protoplanets in the LkCa 15 Transition Disk
المؤلفون: Sallum, S., Follette, K. B., Eisner, J. A., Close, L. M., Hinz, P., Kratter, K., Males, J., Skemer, A., Macintosh, B., Tuthill, P., Bailey, V., Defrère, D., Morzinski, K., Rodigas, T., Spalding, E., Vaz, A., Weinberger, A. J.
المصدر: 2015 Nature 527, 342
سنة النشر: 2015
المجموعة: Astrophysics
مصطلحات موضوعية: Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
الوصف: Exoplanet detections have revolutionized astronomy, offering new insights into solar system architecture and planet demographics. While nearly 1900 exoplanets have now been discovered and confirmed, none are still in the process of formation. Transition discs, protoplanetary disks with inner clearings best explained by the influence of accreting planets, are natural laboratories for the study of planet formation. Some transition discs show evidence for the presence of young planets in the form of disc asymmetries or infrared sources detected within their clearings, as in the case of LkCa 15. Attempts to observe directly signatures of accretion onto protoplanets have hitherto proven unsuccessful. Here we report adaptive optics observations of LkCa 15 that probe within the disc clearing. With accurate source positions over multiple epochs spanning 2009 - 2015, we infer the presence of multiple companions on Keplerian orbits. We directly detect H{\alpha} emission from the innermost companion, LkCa 15 b, evincing hot (~10,000 K) gas falling deep into the potential well of an accreting protoplanet.
Comment: 35 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, 9 extended data items
نوع الوثيقة: Working Paper
DOI: 10.1038/nature15761
URL الوصول: http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.07456
رقم الأكسشن: edsarx.1511.07456
قاعدة البيانات: arXiv